Direct-adaptive fuzzy predictive control for path following of stratospheric airship

This paper presents an effective path following control method for an under-actuated stratospheric airship with model uncertainties. Firstly, the model of the stratospheric airship is described with kinematics and dynamics equations which the controller design is based on. And then, the path following controller is designed which consists of two parts. One part is an analytic model predictive path following controller and the other part is a direct-adaptive fuzzy controller which is constructed to approximate the unknown terms caused by system model uncertainties in the predictive control law. Finally, the simulation results are presented to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.